a multi-tasked stream of consciousness or perhaps just emails to myself
Check out this new streaming audio site… The “Quicktime High” stream is of super quality. January should bring some interesting non-rock options as well, making a good thing better.
MacNN | News: radioio launches MPEG-4 internet radio
If you like things more electronic as I do, you should check out the return of SomaFM (MP3 streams) as well. I’ve been a long time fan and was glad to see they did not get killed by congress.
Thank goodness for the Salon Ultramercial from the Discovery Channel or I would not be able to enter this new area of Salon which is premium content.
Salon.com Arts & Entertainment | Underground rising
Discovery Channel has finally replaced Mercedes with a new surround session. One interesting addition to their ad, aside from being more invasive. is that you can elect to have a voicemail reminder (no iCal??) left by James Cameron to watch their feature The Bismark on Sunday. Too bad it competes with The Sopranos season finale and TiVo can’t watch and record two programs… have to catch it as a replay.
Everyone wants to be like Apple…
Anyone else notice the ads for the HP Media Center are VERY similar to the ads Apple used when iTunes was announced. Line up a bunch of celebrities to choose from to play with on your computer…
Nikon now has ads running with Val Kilmer for the small coolpix camera that are a direct rip of the Apple switch style.
While windows only for now, the AOL Communicator, which is their pending stand-alone email client looks pretty impressive. It offers much of what Outlook Express has which in my opinion was (when I used Windows) better that Outlook based on rules and UI issues, but goes further. The addition of spam filtering, AOL mail sync and an identity manager make this a communications client to watch.
I am glad that this is here as I am also a major Tetris fan. My main addiction was handled by a gameboy as well. I recall getting it as a gift and spending the bulk of a two day drive to Florida from Pennsylvania playing the game. Needless to say I was hooked. I am looking forward to seeing the falling shapes when I close my eyes and when I look at solid colors again…
Tetris: “Quinn is a pure Tetris for OS X—no dumb “innovations” or anything. Right on. I’ve been a Tetris fan since I first played it on a GameBoy a decade ago.” Source: inessential.com
As someone who worked at CDNow in the early days, I find this announcement amazing purely from the historical competitive nature of things. That said, given the number of people laid off at CDNow and the fulfillment and traffic at Amazon this deal does seem to make a lot of sense. I guess the CDNow brand will live on and the Amazon music area will convert. Amazon will also be managing CDNow.com, in the same way that they work with Toys “R” Us, Virginmega.com and Borders.com.
While they mention that you will be able to watch the movies on your TV as well as PC, there is no mention of how this will work. Since you can already hook your PC to a TV using a cable or tow, I hope this announcement is going to being something more like burning into the picture… It would be nice to be able to burn a DVD of content downloaded to watch in the living room.
UPDATE 2/24/03…Just go here and download the OS X installation for jPluck. You will still need Plucker for your Palm.
I have finally gotten Plucker to run on Mac OS X and I wanted to share my experience so others could enjoy this fantastic open-source alternative to AvantGo. AvantGo has not released any information on when or if they plan to support OS X and it has certainly been long enough so time to move on.
The tools:
First you will need to install Java 1.4.1 Developer Preview 6. This is available from Apple’s developer web site which is free to join, but you do need an account. There are libraries within this release that are necessary for this system to work. It may work with Preview 5, but it did not work for me with Preview 4.
Next you need to download the JPluck app which is the Java based Plucker Desktop. It’s available through sourceforge and is an easy download.
The last step is to download the actual Plucker application. This will install locally on your computer and let you choose which language version you want to use on your palm. Once you download and install Plucker it can be found within the Finder by hitting “Apple+Shift+G” and when the box pops up typing in (or pasting) /usr/local/share/plucker. You can then install the app from within the Palm OS Viewer directory (pick the language you want) viewer_en.prc is english. Hotsync it and it is installed.
The how to:
Once you have installed the Java code and hotsynced the Plucker viewer to your Palm you are ready to try out the Desktop. Within the jpluck-1.0-beta3-pr2 Folder (your version number may be different if you do this much later) is a piece named “jpluckx.jar.” This will launch by double clicking it so do that and give it a moment to become active. There is a basic navigation to the app that fortunately provides tips if you hover the buttons. You can open a document and pick the example.jxl file which has a nice array of sites to start with. More can be found from http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?PluckerSoftware though many of those are actually in the example file.
You will have to select a destination directory and to make things easier on yourself, I recommend choosing the installation directory for your Palm desktop. This way when PluckX is through, you can hotsync and then head out, with reading material on your Palm. Since Plucker fully supports VFS, you can choose either the SD folder – /Users/your username/Documents/Palm/Users/username/Files to Install/SecureDigital (SD ) Card or simply one directory back for the basic installation. For now it will have to be two steps as there is no conduit for any platform at this time.
That should do it for you. It works for me and is working well. You might also consider joining the Plucker Mailing list which is where I picked up much of the help I needed…
I was watching TechTV this evening and caught Steve Wozniak as a co-host of The Screen Savers, which was cool unto itself. The highlight though was when Steve offerred some of his favorite Mac Tips…
Woz’s Mac tips
Woz will show us the following Apple tips:
- Using the built-in display zoom of Jaguar: You press command and option and the * key, then you press command and option and the + key to zoom in, command and option and the – key to zoom out.
- FruitMenu ($7 shareware) which allows you to tailor the Apple Menu and contextual menus to your taste.
- A fun utility which makes your screen saver your desktop, called DesktopEffects.
- Snv Desk, which creates falling snowflakes.
- Finally, he’ll show us how to make a slideshow using iPhoto.
Source: TechTV
That’s right! You can send your spam to the Spam Archive at submit@spamarchive.org and they will store and catalog it. The reason for this? So there is a central database for anti-spammers to utilize filters and other tools to fight spam. Pretty cool, right? You can also download spam from the archive if you like via the ftp site – ftp.spamarchive.org.
This is a cool way to scan the blog universe, (aka Cosmos) and see how you or sites you read are being referenced…
Who links to you?: “Find out at Technorati. “Right now, we’re still building this site, so lots of things are still broken. Please don’t publicise it yet, we want to make sure that most of the kinks are worked out before we go live, but in the meantime, feel free to poke around.” [link via evhead]
Source: jenett.radio
For the first time I noticed that Wired.com is running an advertorial from Sony. If you don’t know what an Advertorial is, it’s ad based content written in the form of an article though usually marked in a way so that you are not too easily fooled to think it impartial from the publisher. Magazines run them fairly regularly. This particular piece is titled:
Revolutionary A/V Gear
The Most Advanced Professional Audio-Visual Technology Comes Home
feature by Sony advertising series
You can check it our for yourself here: New Technologies
Just in time for last minute shopping, O’Reilly comes through with a list of items for the geeks you know without the usual bank bending gadget prices…
O’Reilly Network: Gifts for Geeks on the Cheap [Nov. 26, 2002]
Might not be entirely legal, but available now… looks pretty cool and well made and the price is certainly right.
Readymade Pringles antenna for Don’t-DIYers.: “I’m going to get one of these readymade Pringle can antennas for $20. They look cool, too! What a great idea. [Update: Dave Sifry warns that if you buy and use a Cantenna, “you could get your door busted in by the FCC, as ubergeek Tim Pozar explains on the BAWUG list“]LinkDiscuss(Thanks, May!)” Source: Boing Boing
By selecting more than one message you can forward or reply to those messages through a single message. This is especially helpful when you have attachments spread across a few messages and you want to forward everything to someone else. When you do this, you get the headers, body and attachments from each of the selected messages. Cool!
If you are in the market to save a few bucks and have an Earthlink account, you might want to try this tactic. I called to say I wanted to cancel (which I did) and when the first CSR put me on hold to get my confirmation number I knew I was being transferred to the “save team.” The guy comes on and makes me a few deals I can’t refuse… I honestly did not hear the first one (damn I’m tired) but the second offer was for $9.95/mo unlimited with 30 days free.
I really did cancel my account as I have too many email accounts as it is and have other ways of getting online. If you use earthlink as your primary path online, you might benefit from paying half what you do now.
